Ruling — War of the Ring: The Card Game

← War of the Ring: The Card Game

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: War of the Ring: The Card Gamebg-362944-en-1e

To play War of the Ring — The Card Game, follow these steps:

Setup

1. Select a scenario.[1]

2. Prepare the players' decks by taking all cards of the appropriate factions and shuffling them carefully.[1]

3. Each player takes a Ring token and a player aid.[1]

4. The Frodo player takes the starting player token.[1]

5. Separate the Shadow and Free Peoples battleground cards and shuffle each of the two battleground decks separately.[1]

6. Assemble the path deck by stacking path 1 cards on top, followed by path 2 cards, and so on through path 9.[1]

7. Each player draws 7 cards, then must cycle 2 of the cards drawn, leaving a hand of 5 cards.[1]

The Game Round

1. Location Step: The starting player activates one battleground, then one path.[2]

2. Action Step: Players take turns taking actions, or possibly passing, beginning with the starting player and proceeding in the order specified in the scenario.[3] The Action step ends when all players have passed their turns consecutively.[4][3]

* Possible actions include:

* Playing 1 card from your hand (every time you play a card, you must immediately cycle a different card from your hand before resolving the card's text; if playing your last card, you must forsake a card instead).[4][3]

* Moving 1 character or army in reserve to an active path or battleground.[3][5]

* Cycling 1 card from your hand.[3][5]

* Winnowing by eliminating 2 cards from your hand to draw 1 card.[3][5]

* Using an Action to resolve the text of a card in play that indicates you may "use an action to...".[3][5]

* Using a Ring token to draw cards.[3][5]

* A player may pass instead of taking an action only if their number of cards in hand is less than or equal to their carryover limit, or if their number of cards in hand is less than each enemy player.[3][5]

3. Combat Step: Resolve combat on the active battlegrounds and path.[2]

4. Victory Check.[2]

5. Draw Step: The starting player token is passed to the next player.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.4 · 1. SELECT A SCENARIO · 2. PREPARE THE PLAYERS' DECKS · FREE PEOPLES · SHADOW · 3. ARRANGE THE BATTLEGROUND AND PATH DECKS · 4. DRAW CARDS (AND CYCLE)

[2] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.3

[3] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.10 · ACTION S T E P · CARRYOVER LIMIT · ENDING THE ACTION STEP · PLAYING A CARD

[4] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.11

[5] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.3

That's the page. Back to the table.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 88 ms · ask 7441 ms · total 16605 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 9074 ms · generation 7531 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "When you play an army card, place it face up on an active battleground or in your reserve area. To play or move an army to a battleground, its faction must be one of those indicated as an attacker or defender there. Armies may not be played or moved to paths. ARMY ICONS When you play a character car", "headingPath": "PLAYING AN ARMY · PLAYING A CHARACTER · IN PLAY, FROM PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "War of the Ring — The Card Game • 11 ENDING THE ACTION STEP The Action step ends when all players have consecutively passed their turns. PLAYING A CARD When you play a card, take the card from your hand, and use it in some manner, depending on the card’s type, as indicated below. — Every time you pl", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "D uring the Action step, players take turns taking actions , beginning with the starting player, and then proceeding in the order specified in the scenario (Frodo, The Witch-king, Aragorn, Saruman in the Trilogy scenario). When it's your turn, you may take one action , or possibly pass . Play contin", "headingPath": "ACTION S T E P · CARRYOVER LIMIT · ENDING THE ACTION STEP · PLAYING A CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044337, "snippet": "When you play an event card, immediately resolve the game text on the card, then eliminate the card. Event cards are never 'in play' and cannot be placed in reserve. EVENT ICONS -Cards played to your reserve area cannot be moved in the same round. Game text that applies when a card is in the reserve", "headingPath": "PLAYING AN EVENT · PLAYING TO THE RESERVE AREA", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.042803, "snippet": "The diagram below shows the table setup for a 4-player Trilogy scenario game, with the players arranged around the table so the order of play proceeds clockwise. Of course, you may prefer having the two teams facing each other, or some other arrangement. Hand of cards (not shown). Draw deck (face do", "headingPath": "THE PLAY AREA · Each player will have a: · Common areas include:", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.042486, "snippet": "T he game is played over a varying number of game rounds (up to a maximum of 9), using the following sequence: The starting player first activates one battleground and then one path. (See Location Step , on the facing column.) Players take turns taking actions or passing, beginning with the holder o", "headingPath": "THE GAME ROUND · 1. LOCATION STEP · 2. ACTION STEP · 3. COMBAT STEP · 4. VICTORY CHECK · 5. DRAW STEP · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.041639, "snippet": "— Move 1 character or army in reserve to an active path or battleground. — Cycle 1 card from your hand. — Winnow by eliminating 2 cards from your hand to draw 1 card. — Use an Action to resolve the “use an action to...” text of a card in play. — Use a Ring token to draw cards. Instead of taking an a", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.041345, "snippet": "When you are directed to move a card, use the same rules and restrictions as a move action (see page 12 ). When you are directed to activate or reactivate a battleground, or to activate a path, follow the rules on page 8 . When you are directed to remove a card, you must immediately eliminate that c", "headingPath": "MOVE · REACTIVATE/ACTIVATE (BATTLEGROUND OR PATH) · REMOVE · RUNNING OUT OF CARDS · TAKE FROM DRAW DECK", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1. SELECT A SCENARIO · 2. PREPARE THE PLAYERS' DECKS · FREE PEOPLES · SHADOW · 3. ARRANGE THE BATTLEGROUND AND PATH DECKS · 4. DRAW CARDS (AND CYCLE)", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ACTION S T E P · CARRYOVER LIMIT · ENDING THE ACTION STEP · PLAYING A CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 630}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 630 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 630 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.87660 of 1645 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 18:39 UTC

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	PLAYING AN ARMY · PLAYING A CHARACTER · IN PLAY, FROM PLAY	p.10	0.048916 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.11	0.048139 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	ACTION S T E P · CARRYOVER LIMIT · ENDING THE ACTION STEP · PLAYING A CARD	p.10	0.047643 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	PLAYING AN EVENT · PLAYING TO THE RESERVE AREA	p.11	0.044337 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	THE PLAY AREA · Each player will have a: · Common areas include:	p.5	0.042803 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	THE GAME ROUND · 1. LOCATION STEP · 2. ACTION STEP · 3. COMBAT STEP · 4. VICTORY CHECK · 5. DRAW STEP · …	p.8	0.042486 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.3	0.041639 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	MOVE · REACTIVATE/ACTIVATE (BATTLEGROUND OR PATH) · REMOVE · RUNNING OUT OF CARDS · TAKE FROM DRAW DECK	p.13	0.041345 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 46 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.11	#2	0.048139 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	ACTION S T E P · CARRYOVER LIMIT · ENDING THE ACTION STEP · PLAYING A CARD	p.10	#3	0.047643 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	1. SELECT A SCENARIO · 2. PREPARE THE PLAYERS' DECKS · FREE PEOPLES · SHADOW · 3. ARRANGE THE BATTLEGROUND AND PATH DECKS · 4. DRAW CARDS (AND CYCLE)	p.4	#14	0.027072 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.3	#7	0.041639 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.3	#13	0.027222 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	PLAYING AN EVENT · PLAYING TO THE RESERVE AREA	p.11	#4	0.044337 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	PLAYING AN ARMY · PLAYING A CHARACTER · IN PLAY, FROM PLAY	p.10	#1	0.048916 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	PLAYING THE TRILOGY SCENARIO WITH 2 OR 3 PEOPLE · TRILOGY RING TOKEN	p.20	#11	0.027783 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	1. SELECT A SCENARIO · 2. PREPARE THE PLAYERS' DECKS · FREE PEOPLES · SHADOW · 3. ARRANGE THE BATTLEGROUND AND PATH DECKS · 4. DRAW CARDS (AND CYCLE)	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)	ACTION S T E P · CARRYOVER LIMIT · ENDING THE ACTION STEP · PLAYING A CARD	p.10	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.11	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 630)		p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 88 ms · first delta 3533 ms · total 16605 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 9074 ms · retrieval 88 ms · ask 7441 ms · gateway work 7531 ms · total 16605 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3367
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 525
tok/sec: 133.8 tok/sec — 525 output tokens in 3.924 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 48s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 8s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 563), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.